HIV vaccine to be tested on humans in Spain

The trial will start on thirty healthy individuals in the New Year.
Spanish scientists are to start testing a preventative vaccine against HIV. 30 healthy volunteers will be given the jab when the trial starts in January 2009, and they will see their blood tested over the following year.

It’s the first trial of a Phase One vaccine in the country and has been developed by Doctor Mariano Esteban and patented by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC. They will be given a dose of MVA-B which uses the smallpox virus from which 31,000 pieces of nuclear DNA including four HIV proteins have been taken to guarantee safety.

The theory is that with the proteins lacking should the patient later become infected with HIV the infection will develop, but only a latent illness.

This Phase One comes after two years of laboratory tests and two more of tests in rats and primates. In these, none of the animals which were later infected with HIV developed the illness.

Currently there are more than 33 million people infected with HIV in the world, and since its appearance in 1981, AIDS has caused the death of more than 25 million.